State auditor’s office blasts Cal State for mishandling sexual misconduct cases

One day after California State University released a damning report about its mishandlings of sexual misconduct cases, the state auditor’s office has released an investigation of its own — one that calls for urgent, “systemwide changes” across the 23-campus network.

The state auditor’s office reviewed 40 cases of alleged sexual harassment by employees of California State. In the process, it found the nation’s largest public university system repeatedly failed to address allegations of sexual harassment, revealing a lack of accountability at the highest level.

The report noted that “campuses did not consistently count the number of reports of sexual harassment that they received.” But from what they did find, from 2018 to 2022, at least 1,251 employees at California State had been accused of sexual harassment allegations. Just 254 of those were investigated.

At San Jose State, a school that has repeatedly made headlines for its mishandling of sexual misconduct complaints — including those against former athletics trainer, Scott Shaw, who is on trial for allegedly assaulting dozens of female athletes this week — 84 reports of sexual harassment were filed from 2018 to 2022, while just 24 were investigated.

The state auditor’s report did commend San Jose State for the improvements it has made since settling a lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice in 2021. In line with the requirements set out by the federal agency, the university has developed guidance to standardize its allegation assessment process, and begun using a spreadsheet to track the timelines of each active cases. The state auditor’s office encouraged these recommendations, among others required by the Department of Justice resolution, to be adopted systemwide, while also making several additional recommendations to SJ State to improve its reporting system.

The state audit found that across the CSU system, campus officials repeatedly failed to investigate employees accused of sexual misconduct, in part due to “questionable” judgment by Title IX investigators. In one third of all cases, the auditors said they found “deficiencies that causes us to question the campuses’ determinations that sexual harassment had not occurred.”

Across all 23 campuses, 159 employees were the subject of multiple reports of sexual harassment, the report found.

The report echoes the 236-page investigation released on Monday, one commissioned by California State and conducted by law firm Cozen O’Connor. After a year-long assessment, the law firm found the university had mishandled years of sexual misconduct complaints against employees, including those at the highest level — like former CSU chancellor Joseph Castro, who repeatedly shielded a Fresno colleague from the repercussions of his sexual misconduct.

The report said it found a deep-rooted feeling of “institutional betrayal,” along with a widespread distrust among students, staff and faculty at CSU.

“We agree with and will implement the recommendations provided in the audit report, as well as those identified in the Cozen assessment, to strengthen our culture of care and compliance and advance the CSU’s core values of equity, diversity and inclusion,” said CSU Interim Chancellor Jolene Koester in a statement released Tuesday morning.

Getting there will be no easy task. The CSU report includes 10 pages of recommendations for San Jose State alone on how to improve its response to sexual harassment complaints, each with a dozen action items.

The state auditor also issued an extensive series of recommendations to the institution as a whole, ranging from the improvement of sexual harassment policies, codifying expected responses, collecting and tracking data more effectively, and heavily increasing the number of relevant staff.